When to talk about race at work — Worthwhile Language Advice
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If you’re wondering about it, chances are good someone else is wondering about it too!
Last month, I offered to write a column if there was reader interest in this question:
When is it ok to mention race at work and when is it inappropriate and problematic?
Readers were interested. So, let’s go!
The rule of thumb for talking about race at work is pretty simple:
If race is relevant, then talk about it.
If race is not relevant, then don’t bring it up.
But, of course, actually implementing this principle can be subtle and complex. How can you decide if race is relevant? Here are two social science concepts that can help:
1. Sociodemographics
2. Markedness
Sociodemographics
It is human nature to categorize and label the world around us. Ancient texts even portray our desire to name things as a god-given gift! (See, for example, Genesis 2:19.)
One of the ways we categorize the world is by dividing up humans into different kinds of groups and giving those groups names. When we do this, we are emphasizing similarity within a group. We are also emphasizing difference between people in that group and people in another group.
Governments and educational institutions and companies all find it useful to measure who belongs to what groups and how their group membership affects their behavior, their experiences, and their lives.
Tracking and measuring what categories people belong to and how these categories relate to outcomes is called sociodemographics. The goal is to find patterns and correlations. If you know that belonging to Group A means Outcome A is more likely, then you can plan accordingly.
Human beings are complicated! We have lots of different ways we think about and define ourselves. And we are all of those things at once. But institutions and researchers don’t track every category, because not every category is seen as meaningful.
For example, we track age but not hair length. We track race but not skin color or skin undertone. We track sexual orientation but not ear or body piercings.
Just because you might find a Buzzfeed post about it, like “10 Problems Only Short Girls Understand,” doesn’t mean it’s commonly considered a category to be tracked.
Here in the US, the most common categories we track on an individual level are:
Race and ethnicity
Gender
Sexual orientation
Physical ability and disability
Neurotypicality and neurodiversity
Age
Some institutions or studies also track height and weight.
In the US, race is the by far the most influential category when it comes to life outcomes like generational wealth, salary, health disparities, maternal mortality, and life expectancy.
Racial and Ethnic Composition of the United States: 1970 – 2050 (via Wikimedia Commons)
Race is relevant at work when it is a category that explains a pattern or an outcome. When sociodemographics are playing a role.
Note that sometimes race alone is not enough to capture a pattern where race is a factor. For example, legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw came up with the term intersectionality when she saw that using only one category could obscure patterns. She found cases where if you looked only at gender or only at race, you missed a pattern that applied specifically to people who were both a certain gender and a certain race. The relevant set of affected people were at the intersection of two categories.
So, when is race a relevant sociodemographic category at work? When you are looking to find patterns where race may be playing a role, especially when (legally risky) bias may be distorting outcomes. In the workplace, you might track:
Who is in your job candidate pipeline, who is selected for interviews, and who is hired.
Who is given stretch assignments, “glamour” work, and mentorship.
Who is promoted and at what pace.
Who is put on Performance Improvement Plans, who leaves, and at what pace.
Who is paid at what rate, how frequently they are given raises, and the size of those raises.
Who is being spoken to or about with disrespect, and who is being inappropriately pushed to the sidelines or left out altogether.
I work with clients to help them move towards what I called The Optimized Workplace. This is a workplace where everyone feels taken into consideration and valued, everyone is treated with respect, and where obstacles to participation and contributions are identified and removed. Studies have shown that workplace optimization leads to higher innovation, productivity, employee retention, and revenue. Language optimization is central to workplace optimization.
Because race is so strongly correlated with outcomes in the US, if you are not talking about and tracking race as one of your US workplace categories, you are guaranteed to be missing relevant and important patterns. Patterns that are most likely lowering organizational functionality and putting you at legal risk. Patterns that are getting in the way of The Optimized Workplace.
Markedness
While sociodemographics are widely used, most people don’t know about the linguistic concept of markedness.
You can sort a lot of the world into two categories: unmarked and marked.
The unmarked thing is the default, “regular,” the dominant form, the form that requires less effort.
And the marked thing is seen as non-typical, special, divergent— a form that requires more effort. It is often defined in opposition to the “default” unmarked form rather than its own thing. The words used to describe a marked thing are usually longer, with an added suffix or prefix or additional words.
Around the world, the unmarked gender is male, and the marked gender is female. So we have English lion/lioness, rapper/female rapper, Carl/Carla, etc.
In the US, when it comes to race, the unmarked category is people who are white, and the marked category is people who are not white.
You may see the term racialized used to describe people whose race is marked (many of my Canadian readers are using this term already).
When someone is racialized, their race is often brought to the forefront and presented as significant when it actually isn’t relevant. Note that many people live in countries where race is not a relevant category, while caste or religion or tribe are highly influential. When they move to a country with racialization, like the US, they are surprised to suddenly have race be a meaningful category that is applied to them.
Who gets to be called just an unmarked American? And who is described using a racial or ethnic word before American? Asian American, Native American, Black American, African American, Latin American (this one is especially complicated), etc.
Photo of truck driver by Kelly Sikkema (via Unsplash)
Because people are socialized to take markedness into consideration and constantly sort the world into marked and unmarked categories, they often end up pointing out that someone belongs to a marked category even when it’s not relevant. This is also related to the universal human need to identify, and often comment on, difference.
We see this in what are sometimes called “unnecessary adjectives.”
“His very nice Black secretary…”
“An Asian waiter…”
“This Hispanic guy in a pickup truck…”
“The Native American social worker…”
These racialized descriptors are almost never relevant to the story. They’re unnecessary and are only showing up because of markedness, because the person in question is being highlighted as not “the default” or “normal.”
Just like with American vs. Asian American, adding the race or ethnicity before the noun usually happens in popular culture and in workplaces when someone isn’t white.*
If you want to check for yourself, go look at English-language Wikipedia entries for famous US residents who are white and famous US residents who aren’t white. In the Early Life section, you will find again and again that race, ethnicity, or nationality is mentioned for racialized people and not mentioned for white people.
Having people point out that you belong to a marked category can be irritating, angering, exhausting, and more. Some people get to go about their day just being a person, while other people are told again and again that they are a marked person. Different. The other. And, usually, marked as less than or not as good as unmarked, “regular” people.
Like money, race is a social construct. There are no consistent, reliable biological markers of race. None. You cannot use genetics or other biological features to delineate racial difference.
But, like money, your race (in the US and many other countries) is incredibly important and affects almost every aspect of your existence.
Let’s circle back to the rule of thumb: talk about race if it is relevant and do not talk about race if it is not relevant. And now let’s add in sociodemographics and markedness.
Race is relevant if you are tracking workplace experiences and outcomes. What are people’s experiences like? Career velocity? Pay rates? Average tenure? If you’re in the US, and many other countries, race is one of the categories you should be discussing and tracking. Not talking about race in this context sets up your organization for worse outcomes and increased legal risk.
Race may also be relevant when setting up mentorship programs and affinity groups (sometimes known as employee resource groups).
You don’t have to have institutional authority to bring up race and its relationship to workplace experiences. You can be a manager or colleague and want to unofficially move things in the right direction.
You might ask a racialized colleague or report, “Is race playing a role in your work experience here? Are there obstacles or problems I should know about? Is there something I can do to help remove those obstacles?” But recognize that if there isn’t already a strong base of psychological safety and trust, you might not get honest answers to your well-intended questions.
Race is not relevant when it is simply a marked category or an “unnecessary adjective.” Are you going to mention a non-white person’s race or ethnicity when a white person’s race or ethnicity would not be mentioned? Then it’s better to not bring up race at all.
Finally, this rule of thumb doesn’t really apply for in-group conversations among racialized people. If you are not white and want to talk race with other people of color, it’s relevant and appropriate.
Hopefully, using these social science guidelines will help people feel more confident to make judgments about when it is and isn’t appropriate to talk about race at work.
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*You may find white as a racial descriptor in in-group conversations among people of color. My research suggests that this is often correlated to a description of behavior associated with whiteness, so it’s a different pattern.
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